Newbie questions

1. Does buying a super fast SD Card make a huge difference? For example will a SD card with 45mb/s speed work that fast in an OMD or is this purely for using outside the camera when uploading photos. I never see this in manuals

2. Second photo relates to sports photography. Yes I know m4/3 isn't the greatest for this, but it is the only camera I'll have. Has anyone got experience of shooting with something like the 75mm Oly lens with the telephoto on and would this be better or worse than using the 45-200 Panasonic zoom for autofocus?

I don't do any sports photography, but the 45-200 was one of my first lens buys and still probably the smartest lens purchase I've made&mdash;definitely not the quality of the 75, but the stabilization helps me a lot (I'm on a Panasonic body, natch) and it's flexibility and reach has made up for any loss of speed. I've only had slow focus issues when trying to hit birds in flight against a blue sky, it should do markedly better pointing across or down at a sports field/court.

1. Faster cards will result in faster write times up to a point. Not sure where that point is, but if you want to do lots of burst shooting, then getting the fastest card possible makes sense.

2. The 75 is a great indoor sports lens since it's fast. With ISO cranked up to 1600 or 3200, you be able to shoot at fast enough speeds to freeze action in most venues. For outdoor sports, it can be a bit short and something like a 75-300 or 100-300 might better, but these are much slower and poorer IQ. The tele converter (by which I assume you mean the digital converter) is pointless since all it's doing is cropping - you'd be better off doing this yourself in post processing (you are shooting raw aren't you!)

PS. - the 45-200 is a dreadful lens IMHO. Contrast and sharpness at 200 are very poor. You'd be better off with the 45-175 which is a much better lens IQ wise.

You can shoot an EM5 in burst mode for about a dozen shots with a slower card. Then you wait half a minute before you can do it again.

I tested this on my EM5. The fast internal camera buffer takes about 12 RAW files or 13-16 JPG's at high speed before it fills up. After that, you wait for the buffer to write off enough space for the next shot. With my 30MB/sec card, I was waiting around 2 seconds between successive shots. For 17 shots, the whole process took 27 seconds.

Here's a source with more measured times for you, Their OMD EM5 can pump out 15 RAW shots in 21 seconds on a 45 MB/sec card, and 16 frames in 7 seconds with a 95 MB/sec card. So if you want to blast out 100 shots per minute, you want that 95MB/sec card.

By the way, I thought that I could get more shots into the buffer if I switched from 16MB RAW files to small 1.7MB JPGs and even tinier 300MB JPG's, but the buffer filled up just as quick. I might have gotten 15 tiny JPG's written before it filled. Must be a lot of overhead attached to each image regardless of size that controls the buffer.

I'm going to step in to defend the 45-200 again&mdash;contrast suffers, but I've never found results even at the long end that weren't salvageable so long as I had enough light. The aperture's the limiting factor, it gets slow at maximum telephoto for sure.

Wavey,
First off, yes. An SD card with a faster write speed helps loads when shooting sports. I recently saw a 16GB SanDisk Extreme SDHC Class 10 at Best Buy for $20. Highly recommended.
Secondly, I have to defend the 45-200mm as well. I am on a relatively tight budget and that was what I could afford at the time. In September, armed with the 45-200 coupled to an E-PL2, I went to see a Grand-Am race at Lime Rock Park. While some photos did require post-processing, you can see for yourself that the lens performed beautifully.